[Lazarus] Suggestion: Remove GTK1 support from IDE and LCL.

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Florian Klaempfl wrote:

> Debian Lenny is still at 2.10 afaik.

Is there a portable way that an app can query the widget set version for 
an "About" box or error report? I'm routinely displaying FPC and Lazarus 
versions as determined at compilation but knowing what's been found at 
runtime would be useful.

> And don't forget: FPC still uses only i386 instructions in the default
> setup while using Pentium4+ stuff would allow often much better code.
> All modern CPUs support it for years ;)

I raised a bit of interest elsewhere by comparing Delphi and FPC code 
generation. Delphi is still stuck on i386 and doesn't know about SSE 
etc., so it's arguable whether FPC by default needs to do better.

Looking at Debian "Lenny" as an example, I think it's worth noting that 
the kernel and libc appear to be -i686 but everything else is -i386. 
Obviously there might be Pentium-aware optimisation in the binaries but 
I'm not sure that can be checked by inspection.

I think I'd vote for i686 AKA P-II, but with minimal capabilities check 
during installation. Again, I think this suggests that an easily-found 
compatibility matrix would be a great help.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]